It’s officially the year of Lauren Daigle: the Grammy-nominated artist has been named Billboard‘s Top Christian Artist of the Year.
“It’s been an incredible year,” Daigle told Billboard. “New creative collaborators, a new producer, new writers and most of all new friends. Our fans on the road have been so incredible and we can feel their love and their energy every single night, and for me that connection (to our music) is inspiring. I am so unbelievably grateful to them, to be able to do what I love and look forward to so much more in ’24.”
This year, Daigle released her two-part self-titled album as a sort of “fresh start” after a brief hiatus.
“This album is self-titled because it was definitely a new beginning for me internally,” Daigle told RELEVANT in our summer cover story. “This was a new beginning for me to simply begin again. It was a step for me to say, ‘Okay God, I see places in my life that I have let go of and now I get to start over and regain the things that I thought I lost.’”
Daigle’s “rebirth” resulted in one of her most commercially successful years yet. The album topped Billboard‘s Christian Albums charts and sits at No. 7 on the overall year-end ranking. And thanks to the album’s lead single, “Thank God I Do,” Daigle is the only artist ever to have two Hot Christian Songs No. 1s that dominated for 20 weeks or more (the other one is, of course, her massive hit song “You Say.”)
Daigle is in the midst of her Kaleidoscope Tour around the world. In the spring, she’ll be joined on the road by recent RELEVANT Podcast guest Ellie Holcomb.
